What is a Counterculture in the 21st Century?

east

Member
Have been looking at ideas of the counterculture in the 60s and 70s for a college thesis and started to wonder what a counterculture looks like, believes in, etc, today.
 

zhao

there are no accidents
malcom mclaren, if he can be viewed as any kind of authority on the subject, once said "today's rebels are not in the streets starting fires, they are in libraries"

how i feel about that i'm not quite sure...
 

swears

preppy-kei
In what way are nerds counter to the prevailing culture?

In some ways they reject the prevailing norms of sociabilty, appearance, obsession with being accepted/liked etc...

Even though you do have nerds like Bill Gates that are in positions of incredible power and wealth, the average nerd is still definitely more outside of the cultural mainstream of fashion and social behaviour than your average punk or hippie now. In a society where it's considered cool to be dumb, any sort of rigorous thinking/analysis can be dismissed as "geeky" or "nerdy".
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
In a sense post-modernity means that counter-culture is impossible, surely?

Nerds, whilst visually not according with the arithmetic mean fashion sense are entirely productive / consumptive in accordance with the fundamental principles of consumer capitalism--- indeed Nerds consume more than the average, (Is a hipster not merely a fashionable nerd?) Indeed the entire kid-ult centric image of modern capital is formed by nerds, for nerds. The increased nerdification of society serves the interests of late capital, in other words!
 

MATT MAson

BROADSIDE
"Nerds" doesn't really cut it for me. Bill Gates and the thinking he brought to computing were definitely not at odds with the way society operated. Before he tried to stop the Homebrew Computer Club using his BASIC software, the rest of the computing industry was treating code and software as information which should be shared and distributed freely. After Gates, it became intellectual property.

The counter-cultural revolutionaries were Richard Stallman and those others in computing who didn't agree with Gates, and their alternative was open-source. Today it's hackers who have replaced punks and the Situationists as those pushing subversive ideas. When you get deep into these fundamentals about information, these debates over how we should use it become very philosophical, but then play out in the real world as Windows vs. Linux, Wikipedia vs. Britannica etc etc.

What is also interesting is how much of this thinking came from 1960s and 1970s counter culture. What The Dormouse Said by John Markoff is a great read which explores this link in detail.
 

swears

preppy-kei
gek:

It depends on your definition of nerd I guess...

If you class a nerd as on obsessive collector/consumer then you are right regarding hipsters, "kidults", etc...

It also depends on your definition of "counter culture" you could say the hippies were one, but they were consumers like anybody else, a lot of them eventually becoming yuppies twenty years later.

The idea of a nerd as somebody willing to spend time engaged with something academic or complex goes against our culture of disposable, flash-in-the-pan postmodernity. If people are going to get involved with issues as complicated as carbon emissions or late capitalism, then they're going to have to get a bit "nerdy".

You are framing the question of a counter culture from a leftist/anti-capitalist point of view, (which is fair enough) but the accepted idea of what constituted a counter culture in the past is not necessarily defined in those terms. Punk rock, for example could be right wing, nihilistic, etc...
 

mms

sometimes
I don't think there is any one counter culture and any true counter cultures, there are lots of international subcultures but there is no opposition to cultural norms at critical mass, which is what to an extent the 50's to early 70's were, although of course they didn't oppose capitalism but set up their own replicates of capitalist systems, (adjusted to fit in with ideals of course) but on a large enough scale to counter mainstream society.

I guess the nearest to it is the change in attitude between traditional japan and the young there, or the young in russia, although their counterculture seems to be very aggressively nihilistic.

As gek says a counter-culture is kind of impossible, unless it means total revolution, and i don't necessarily mean in a marxist sense.

There are lots of subcultures of all different shades and quite a strong revival of interest in the work play and ideals of the original hippies, esp in the US, plus there is a huge movement about the value and ethics of information esp on the internet, but society is too fragmented for an actual counterculture to develop i think.
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
Surely it all comes down to how accomodating society is in eventually absorbing said culture: the example I might think of as genuinely countercultural then would be neo-nazi movements, paedophiles etc. Even then the aesthetic of desire that motivates the Nazi or the paedophile are still fundamentally originated within conventional mass culture (cf the Madeleine McCann photos, lovingly slo-mo'd paedo-friendly home video shots of the doe-eyed abductee... the paedo-aesthetic is nowhere stronger than the tabloid media)...

I agree open-source and copy-left are subversive ideas. But do they exactly consititute "cultures" per-se?
 

Gavin

booty bass intellectual
You are framing the question of a counter culture from a leftist/anti-capitalist point of view, (which is fair enough) but the accepted idea of what constituted a counter culture in the past is not necessarily defined in those terms. Punk rock, for example could be right wing, nihilistic, etc...

This is practically a prerequisite when capital controls mainstream culture -- if you are counter to mainstream culture, antagonism to capital is pretty necessary.

This still can come from the "right"; certain evangelical Christian sects can be considered countercultures, and there's plenty of anticapitalism wrapped up in their rhetoric, though not articulated as such. Renouncing worldly pleasures, a distaste for vulgar materialism. This is also true of radical Islam, which I would also consider a counterculture.

I'll agree with Gek that nerds are the predominant vehicle for consumerist identification... Witness all the comic book movies that consciously court geek audiences, the absence of "traditional" muscular blue-collar masculinity in popular entertainment (except for comic relief) -- instead the protagonists of our entertainment are nebbish nerds bustling away in cubicles -- The Office a prime example, or Heroes:

heroes_hiro_interview_3.jpg
 

Chris

fractured oscillations
Surely it all comes down to how accomodating society is in eventually absorbing said culture: the example I might think of as genuinely countercultural then would be neo-nazi movements, paedophiles etc. Even then the aesthetic of desire that motivates the Nazi or the paedophile are still fundamentally originated within conventional mass culture (cf the Madeleine McCann photos, lovingly slo-mo'd paedo-friendly home video shots of the doe-eyed abductee... the paedo-aesthetic is nowhere stronger than the tabloid media)...

It's a catch 22 isn't it? The only true countercultures, if you define them as cultures or causes that could never possibly be accepted in normal society, aren't even worth pursuing (Nazism, paedophiles, terrorisism, etc).

But does that mean that the bohemians of the Montmartre, various art movements, the beats, hippies, punks, ravers, etc... weren't true countercultures because their values and art eventually trickled out to be adopted by the rest of society? I'd rather look at it all as a futile but ultimately important gesture nonetheless...

As of now, though it's not exactly a movement... I think Swears is onto something about nerds... They do seem to be up on things before everyone else (although generally according to their specialized interests and expertise)... In my experience, it seems like the more cutting edge an art opening or concert is, the nerdier the crowd. It's the nerds (and artists, cultural outsiders, intellectuals, etc.), that IMO even the most savvy hipsters and cool-seekers are ultimately trying to imitate, whether they (hipsters) realize it or not. Just read up on the history of any counterculture... they seem to have always started with brainiacs and artists.
 
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Chris

fractured oscillations
real nerds ie kids at school who weren't good socially or at sport but good academically and not particulary good looking would never be cutting edge, it's more like the modes for being good at social interaction and the processes of creating art and culture have changed into things that need alot of action on computers that there is a certain amount of nerdiness to the people who are shaping communication and the way we shop etc in the future.

True, most computer nerds I've known have dreadful taste in music (Linkin Park, etc)... I was refering more to music and art nerds I guess... or geeks, I forgot what the politically-correct nomenclature decided on in the 90s was... :slanted:

* the post I just responded to was there a second ago... :confused:
 
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east

Member
As with any of those 'groups' mentioned, the degree with which they might be considered a counterculture depends entirely on how the term is defined in the first place. It's traditionally been used to describe a group of people that have opposed the dominant or 'establishment' culture (as in life values, moral codes, ways of living, aesthetic values, etc) of their own society. There is no-real sense that countercultures have been required to even want to change that society to suit themselves, rather that they seek a space of relative autonomy as far outside of its control as possible.

In this sense, one of the more obvious examples of a type of contemporary counterculture are the various militia groups that have sprung up across parts of America since the 90s.
 
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Islam?

Apart from that, aren't we just confusing two different definitions of "nerd" in this thread -

nerd as it is seen now - hyper trendy consumer, dressing a certain way, not necessarily a deep thinker although possibly.

nerd as it used to be - clueless about trends and socially inept, but very intellectual. possibly disdainful about what they might see as trivial concerns such as fashion etc.
 

east

Member
Either way, William Gibson had a helluva lot to answer for when he invented the Panther Moderns.
 

vimothy

yurp
I think this is about right for last century:

...On the left gathered those who were most alive to the new possibilities created by the unprecedented mass affluence of the postwar years but at the same time were hostile to the social institutions—namely, the market and the middle-class work ethic—that created those possibilities. On the right rallied those who staunchly supported the institutions that created prosperity but who shrank from the social dynamism they were unleashing. One side denounced capitalism but gobbled its fruits; the other cursed the fruits while defending the system that bore them. Both causes were quixotic, and consequently neither fully realized its ambitions. But out of their messy dialectic, the logic of abundance would eventually fashion, if not a reworked consensus, then at least a new modus vivendi.

- http://www.reason.com/news/show/120265.html
 

rhi

Wild Horses
Surely the loose assemblage of groups that makes up the anti-globalization movement is the closet to a genuine counter-culture movement ?
 
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